Framed For Murder (An Anna Nolan Mystery) Page 3

  I decided to put off telling him about Jack until after dinner, so we chatted about how his week had gone at the summer job he had with a Calgary building supply store. Ben had worked there part-time during the school year, and had been lucky enough to get full-time hours when classes were over. He put on the kettle to make a cup of tea when we finished eating, and piled our dirty dishes beside the sink. After he had fixed his tea and sat down again, I broke the news to him about his dad. Ben stared at me until I had run out of words, and then cleared his throat.

  “So, he’s dead, Mom?”

  “Yes, honey, he’s gone.” There was a long pause while he absorbed these words. I could see the shock in Ben’s face.

  “And you found him while you were out walking Wendy? He was just lying on the ground in some bush beside Wistler Road?”

  “That’s right, honey.”

  Ben frowned and thought some more. “You said he’d been shooting a film in Longview, but you hadn’t heard from him?”

  “No. Your father didn’t call me or stop by the house. I would have told you about it if he had. I had no idea that he was even in this part of the country.”

  “And the police haven’t told you how he died yet?”

  “No, honey, it takes some time to get the test results. But he was shot in the chest. I’m pretty sure that it was murder.” I watched Ben, waiting for his reaction to that ugly and frightening word. He scowled and got up from the table.

  “I’ve got to put my load in the dryer.”

  “Ben?” I called after him as he rushed from the room. The washer and dryer were in the basement, and I heard his feet pounding down the stairs. I decided to give him a few minutes to himself, and loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. I was cleaning the sink when I heard his step behind me.

  “Mom?”

  I turned, and he wound his arms around me and lowered his head to my shoulder. “Are you okay, honey?” I asked, and he started to cry, quiet tears at first that grew into wrenching sobs.

  “He never, he never . . . .”

  “What honey?” I asked, stroking his back.

  It all came out in a gush. “I wrote him a letter last Christmas. Sent it to his agent. It was a really angry letter about him not showing up for my graduation. The agent said he gave it to him. And Dad never wrote back. He didn’t call. He just didn’t give a damn about me!”

  “Oh, Ben, I’m so sorry,” I said, tightening my arms around him, tears spilling down my own cheeks. He clung to me. “He loved you, honey. I know he did. He would have made a better friend for you than a father, now that you’re older. He was a funny guy, passionate, a real charmer, but he was such a lousy father.”

  “I hated him,” Ben said in a wild voice muffled by my shoulder.

  “What?” I asked, pulling away so that I could see his face.

  Ben straightened and wiped his face with his sleeve. Then he looked me in the eye. For a moment, I saw an expression so full of anger and hatred that it frightened me. I gasped. He stared back at me, his expression changing into one of concern.

  “Mom, are you okay?” he asked, taking my hand. “I’m sorry, Mom, I haven’t been thinking about you in all of this. You found his body – that must have been a big shock. How’re you feeling?” As he put an arm around my shoulders and led me back to my chair, I wondered if I had imagined that horrible look. Maybe I was still in shock from Jack’s death.

  “Would you like me to stay tonight, Mom?” he asked, crouching down beside me at the table.

  “Thanks, but don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, but that’s no big deal. I can get up in time to drive in.”

  “I don’t want to impose,” I said, not sure that I wanted him to stay.

  Ben stood up, patted my shoulder, and stepped back toward the sink. “No problem. I’ll finish cleaning up, and then we’ll take Wendy for a walk.” Wendy’s tail thumped on the floor and we both turned to look at her. “Damn,” he said, turning back to the sink, “this is so totally bizarre. Are the police saying it’s murder?”

  I watched his back from my chair. “No, they’re waiting for the coroner’s report before they say anything.”

  Ben was silent as he wiped down the counter. “Could it have been suicide?” he asked with a shrug.

  “I don’t see how, honey. Not unless he walked there – there was no car around. And why would he choose to kill himself in the middle of nowhere?”

  Ben let out the dish water and dried his hands. “I guess not, then,” he said, putting down the towel and turning to me. His face was calm. “Ready for our walk?”

  “Sure. Thanks for finishing up.”

  Later that night, I had a nightmare. In my dream, I was back in the bush crouched over Jack’s body. I looked up and saw Ben emerging from the trees with a gun in his hand, his face contorted with rage. There was blood dripping from his hands, and he wiped a long streak of it across Jack’s face. Jack’s body started to spasm and blood gurgled from his mouth. I ran away into the trees, and woke with my heart racing. As I lay in bed gasping, I could hear Ben’s soft snores drifting down the hallway.

  Ben’s confession that he had hated his father, coupled with that dreadful expression on his face, must have really disturbed me. I knew that Ben had resented his father growing up, and I didn’t blame him in the least for that. But hatred? That was a powerful emotion. I had never hated Jack and, heaven knows, he had broken my heart often enough to give me cause. But I had made my peace with our marriage and with the trouble his cheating had caused me, and now I mostly felt indifferent when I thought about Jack.

  I sat up to rearrange my pillows into a more comfortable position and lay down again, but it was no use – I was too restless get back to sleep. Unwanted thoughts kept careening around my head like the ball in a pinball machine. I turned on my bedside lamp and picked up a framed picture of Ben and me from my side table. It had been taken at the beach when he was eight years old. In the picture, I was sitting on a towel smiling up at the camera as Ben crept up behind me with a plastic pail full of water and a big, mischievous grin lighting up his face. He was missing a front tooth, and his goofy expression always made me smile. I mentally compared that face with the angry young man I had seen today, and shook my head. If it hadn’t been for that stupid dream, the thought of Ben shooting Jack would never have crossed my mind. There, I admitted it. I was afraid that Ben had shot Jack.

  The idea was ludicrous. Where would Ben get a gun from, anyway? He was just nineteen – still a kid. He was my son. He couldn’t have done such a terrible thing. And there was absolutely no proof that he had done anything, nothing but an ugly suspicion brought on by a bad dream. No, I was just going to have to bury that thought deep within my sub-conscious and never let it torture me again.

  In the end, I had to get up and go look at Ben asleep in his bed, his face so young and vulnerable, before I could get back to sleep.

  Chapter Five

  Saturday morning the telephone woke me up. I raised my head to squint at the clock-radio beside my bed. It was 8 AM.

  “Hello?” I mumbled into the receiver.

  “Anna Nolan?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “Mrs. Nolan, my name is Larry Hubert. I’m a reporter with the Calgary Record. I want to do a background story on your ex-husband, Jack Nolan – a look at his personal life, his family and friends – that sort of thing. Can I ask you some questions?”

  “No comment,” I said, banging down the phone. I had no desire to be quoted as the “grieving ex-wife” in the newspaper. What a hell of a way to be woken up in the morning. I got out of bed and shuffled down the hallway to see if Ben was still there. The bed was made and he had already left.

  I decided to lay low that day and avoid people, so I drove to a grocery store that I occasionally used at the south end of Calgary to buy my weekly supplies. While waiting in line at the check-out, I picked up the Saturday paper and saw the headline, “Actor Murdered During Local Fi
lm Shoot,” sprawled across the front page. Beside the article was a picture of Jack taken about ten years ago, probably at a film premiere, judging by the tuxedo and the winning smile he always saved for the press. Scanning the article and following the story to page two, I saw my name mentioned as his “former wife.” It said that Jack’s body had been discovered out on Wistler Road by a “passerby,” and that the investigation was ongoing. Thank heaven the police hadn’t disclosed me as the passerby to the reporters. Happily, Ben’s name was omitted from the article altogether.

  I tossed the newspaper into my cart and checked out of the store as quickly as I could before heading back to Crane. As upset as I was, I couldn’t help but notice what a beautiful day it was, warm and windy with a Chinook cloud stretched low and grey across the snow-etched mountains. I itched to get outside for a long ramble, but spent the afternoon industriously cleaning the house. Poor Wendy didn’t get a walk until after nightfall when I figured there’d be nobody out on the streets to recognize me. We had broken from our routine; I avoided the walk into the countryside now. I just didn’t have the stomach for it anymore.

  As we approached the house after our walk, I saw a strange car parked in my driveway and a man I didn’t recognize sitting on the bench on my front porch. I slowed down, reining Wendy in beside me. I sure hoped it wasn’t that newspaper reporter who had called this morning. We advanced toward the house cautiously until I could make out Steve Walker in my porch lamp. Relieved, I waved and strode up the front walk to my house.

  “Evening, Steve. I didn’t recognize you at first,” I called. He was out of uniform in a pair of jeans and a light blue shirt. Wendy wiggled up to him, and he bent down to pat her while I plopped onto the bench beside him. He lifted his head and I could see that his expression was grim. My stomach sank. “What can I do for you?” I asked warily.

  “We got the coroner’s preliminary report back today, Anna,” he said. “I thought I’d come by to tell you about it rather than asking you to come by the station. Nice night – want to talk out here?”

  “Sure,” I replied. “I appreciate you coming by the house, Steve. What did you find out?”

  “Mr. Nolan died from a single 45-calibre bullet through the heart, Anna. And he didn’t die where you found him – his body was moved, although there wasn’t enough evidence to know where he was murdered. The coroner estimates the time of death between 6 and 9 PM. I called May Weston and Erna Dombrosky, and they both swore that you were sitting with them in the library from 6:00 to 7:30.”

  I was glad to hear that. “That’s great news. Now you can count me out. I came straight home after the meeting, Steve. I wouldn’t have had time to kill Jack and move his body.” But, peering into Steve’s face, I could see that he still looked worried.

  “Maybe. You could have killed him if you had done it right after the meeting. You had an hour and a half.”

  “Less than that, Steve, unless I killed him at my house, which I didn’t. By the time I got back from the library, it was a quarter to eight. I left my car at home and walked over to the library, remember? So I would have had a little over an hour, tops. Hardly enough time to have met with Jack, killed him, and moved his body.”

  Steve sighed. “It sure would have helped if someone had come to the door while you were home and could vouch for you being there.” I shook my head and looked away. “Well, it wouldn’t hurt if you volunteered to let the forensics squad go over your house, just to rule it out as the murder scene. And your car, since Mr. Nolan’s body was moved.”

  I raised my eyebrows but swallowed back my response, which was to tell him to get a search warrant. How could the police seriously believe that I had killed Jack? What about a motive and an adequate amount of time to have murdered him? But I reconsidered, deciding that I’d gain more from the police by co-operating.

  “Sure, that’s no problem. They can do it anytime – tomorrow, if you like. I know from the mystery novels I’ve read that it’s almost impossible to destroy traces of blood from porous surfaces.”

  Steve rolled his eyes. “Mystery novels. Things don’t get solved as neatly as they do in books, you know.”

  I rolled my eyes right back. “I know that. I live in the real world, Steve. I even know that crimes don’t always get solved.” Steve nodded.

  “What about motives, Steve? Have you thought about who had the strongest motive for killing Jack?” His eyes darted to me and flicked away again. “No – me? You’re kidding. What reason could I possibly have had for wanting to kill Jack after all these years?”

  Steve said, “Anna, it was no secret how you felt about your ex-husband. I remember overhearing Erna Dombrosky tell you last fall that she’d seen Mr. Nolan on TV. You made it pretty clear then that your ex was a jerk and that you were glad to be rid of him.”

  “Yes, I remember that conversation, but so what? Lots of people think their exes are jerks.”

  “Okay, Anna, but let’s look at it from a police perspective.” Steve stood up and began to pace around my little eight-foot wide porch. “Jack Nolan was found dead out on Wistler Road and you’re the only known connection he had to Crane. What was he doing in Crane that night, Anna? Was he trying to see you again – or maybe Ben? Did he think that Ben was still living with you? You keep saying that you hadn’t talked to him since your divorce.”

  The last thing I wanted was for Ben to get dragged into the investigation. I almost asked Steve if he had checked on Amy Bright’s whereabouts that night, but I didn’t want him to think that I was trying to deflect suspicion from Ben and me by accusing Amy. Instead, I leaned back on the bench and crossed my legs, trying to look nonchalant. “I think you’re on a bit of a fishing expedition there, officer,” I said.

  Steve gave me a hard look. “Alright, Anna, here’s another possibility. Maybe you arranged for someone else to kill him.”

  I snorted and straightened up. “You mean, like a hit man?”

  Steve stopped pacing and sat back on the bench beside me. “Don’t laugh, Anna. It’s a genuine possibility. You have friends.”

  “Yeah, I can just see seventy-nine year old Erna Dombrosky going after my no-good ex-husband with a .45 because he cheated on me four years ago.”

  “Or, you could have paid someone to do it. Look, Anna, I’m trying to warn you here. Don’t think that you’re not under serious suspicion just because we haven’t arrested you yet.” I jumped. “Number one: you had a motive for killing Jack. He cheated on you for years, and you wanted revenge. Number two: he called you that evening, even though you swore he hadn’t spoken to you in four years. Number three: there’s at least an hour and a quarter of your time unaccounted for that night. No,” he said as I started to protest, “being home by yourself doesn’t count. And number four: I found you standing over the body.”

  Okay, I was getting riled. I’d been helpful up until then, but he was talking crazy about hit men and arresting me. I swivelled around until our knees were touching.

  “Look, Steve, I already explained how I found Jack’s body,” I said. “Yes, that creep cheated on me repeatedly during our marriage, so I divorced him. But I fell out of love with Jack years before our marriage ended, and I was glad to be free of him. I didn’t want anything more to do with him, and I never saw him again or spoke to him after the divorce. I didn’t kill him, and I certainly didn’t ask anyone to kill him for me. That’s it. That’s all I know.” I jabbed him in the chest to emphasize my point.

  Steve grabbed my wrist. “Anna,” he said in a threatening tone. That was enough for Wendy, who had climbed to her feet during my speech. She barked and grabbed Steve’s arm between her teeth. “Shit!” he yelled.

  “Wendy, bad girl! Let go!” I shouted, whacking her on the shoulder. She released Steve, ducked her head, and crawled under the bench. I’d had her since she was a puppy, and she had never attacked anyone in her life.

  “Steve, I’m so sorry,” I said, springing to my feet as he jumped up. Lights snapped on next door, and I
saw Betty Hiller, my neighbour, peering at me from her front door. “It’s okay, Betty,” I called, waving before turning back to Steve. He was examining his shirt sleeve, and as I looked over his shoulder, I could see a couple of small punctures in the fabric.

  “It’s alright. I don’t think she even broke the skin,” he said, sparing me a glance. Then he turned to my dog and said, “Gee, Wendy, I thought we were friends.” He squatted down beside her and held out his hand. She glanced at me with big eyes, the whites showing around the irises, before looking back at him.

  “It’s okay, Wendy,” I said in a reassuring voice. She came out from under the bench to sniff at Steve’s hand.

  “Good girl,” he said, scratching behind her ear. Her tail waved and she relaxed.

  “Steve, I’m really sorry. I’ll pay to replace your shirt,” I said.

  “Never mind. We were both getting a little excited. I’ll let it go this time, but just make sure that she never attacks anyone again. There could be some serious repercussions if she did. Unofficially, though, I’m glad that she defended you,” he said with a small smile.

  “Yeah, too bad she wasn’t around when I was married to Jack.”

  “He didn’t . . . .” The smile faded and he put a hand on my shoulder.

  “No, he never touched me,” I hastened to assure him. “I never had that kind of trouble with Jack.” I didn’t want to give Steve any false ideas about Jack being a wife-beater.

  “Good, because I’d hate to hear of anyone mistreating you.” He stared into my eyes for a moment, long enough to make me feel uncomfortable, before removing his hand and standing up. “I’m going to go now, Anna, while everything’s still friendly. But what I said before still stands. Stick around town so that you’re available for questioning. And if you can think of anything that might help the investigation, give me a call.”